From erotic books to a watch with the most tender dedication: the objects that marked the lives of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, up for auction

"I'm at home in Connecticut, in the library, sitting in an elegant armchair by the fireplace. I just smoked a joint while remembering with absolute clarity the complete map of the town in which I spent my childhood." If you are looking for a memorable beginning of autobiography, there goes this one from The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man that Paul Newman (1925-2008) gave to press in 2008, just weeks before his death. An unexpected book for scarce in the self-imposition of medals that is usually the sole purpose of most memorialists, and focused on the contrary in confessions against the grain and intimate episodes that trace with certain guarantees two different profiles: that of a man perhaps not as ordinary as the title advances and that of a life, This one, yes, absolutely extraordinary.

A life, or the memory of it, whose fragments slowly begin to crumble. The first of the auctions in which Paul Newman's family puts on sale an infinity of the actor's personal belongings starts today at the New York headquarters of Sotheby's. No one should rush to read this fact as a desire to forget on the part of those close to him: despite the inevitable dispersion consubstantial to Hollywood, Newman was always a person for whom the family was a priority element – much more since in 1978 an overdose took the eldest of his six children, Scott – and defining his marriage with Joanne Woodward as one of the most stable that Los Angeles has ever known. It has long been commonplace.

One of the photographs offered on the Sotheby's lot: Paul Newman and Sofia Loren on the set of 'Lady L' (1965). Sunset Boulevard (Corbis via Getty Images)

There are two and a half hundred objects of everyday life that review the long film career of the couple, but above all they outline the sketch of an intimacy that seems to be revealed through them. An intimacy that sometimes goes beyond the private sphere to trace a parallel history of the second half of the twentieth century, when Newman and Woodward became an inescapable presence in the social and political life of the United States. Convinced Democrats, their participation in the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King was the trigger for a presence that would extend throughout the country's public debate, from the end of the war in Vietnam to the struggle for the rights of the LGTBI community.

The numerous letters issued from the White House that appear in the auction show this: from Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or the Obamas, for whom the couple always expressed their sympathy, or George Bush, for whom not so much. None of them wore Newman as proudly as the internal memorandum of the Nixon administration that placed him at number nineteen on the list of the president's main enemies. You can also bid on it.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in their 11th Street apartment in New York in 1958.CBS Photo Archive (Getty Images)

For the most fetishistic, the section of the lot that has aroused the greatest curiosity is the immense amount of objects in which you can follow the trail of Newman's career in front of and behind the cameras, in an arc that goes from the mask used to deform the face of the boxer who focuses his first film as a protagonist, Marked by hate (1956), until a storyboard of what would end up being his last film, Road to Perdition (2002). In between, the dream of any cinephile: the costumes of the play Our Town in which he worked for the first time with Woodward, original posters of films such as Samantha (1963) that would recreate the Cannes Festival in 2013, the boots of Butch Cassidy that Newman wore in Two Men and a Destiny (1969), personalized pool cues in the name of Eddie Felson, his character in The Hustler (1961), the wives who chained him in The Legend of the Indomitable (1968) or the certificates of the Academy for the seven nominations that travel the path that goes from The cat on the zinc roof (1958) to The Color of Money (1986).

Of course, the most revealing are the objects of the couple's private sphere. A long hundred, perhaps those of lesser economic value but also the most transparent of a life in common that aesthetically seems to be two independent. And we go back to the phrase with which he started this story, in which Newman remembered spending hours recalling some childhood years that he tried to reconstruct obsessively for the rest of his life. A childhood spent in Shaker Heights, which the actor defines as "the suburb of Cleveland in which the other suburbs of the United States aspired to become", where a Jewish family fell with that taste so typical of the high bourgeoisie of the first half of the century, so anchored in the nineteenth century and that prefigured an aesthetic aspiration that Newman kept unscathed for the rest of his life: "It could be said that my concept of decoration starts right from that carefully furnished showcase." It is worth a detail to locate everything: the future actor remembered how his mother had come to buy a dog just because it matched the color of the carpet.

The rug that Joanne Woodward made with the names of her and her husband. Courtesy of Sotheby's

The program of 'Our Town', the play where Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward met. Courtesy of Sotheby's

A style, or rather a lack of it, which in the United States is ironically called Bloomingdale's in homage to the catalogs of a department store whose meticulous reproduction was understood by a certain high bourgeoisie as a sign of good taste. Cold, impersonal and invariably old-fashioned, which made those thirties of Newman's childhood move aesthetically in an indeterminate stretch of the transit from the nineteenth to the twentieth. Pure American Gothic that the actor would reproduce to exhaustion in their homes as if seeking to materialize a lost arcadia. Because if anything abounds in the Sotheby's catalog are paintings, many paintings, all of them belonging to that certain American realism that would extend well into the twentieth century, all of them invariably kitsch. Landscapes, still lifes, hieratic men wrapped in coats, children with old people's faces and deformed proportions, all seem to make up an endless still life with scenes that today only have a place in those rural horror films to which American cinema is so fond. The tiny starting prices that Sotheby's has set for them do not deceive: for just two hundred dollars one can become a participant in this aesthetic apocalypse.

Let's rescue from among them, yes, a delicate portrait of Woodward by the American painter Aaron Shikler to point out that it is from the hand of Joanne, a good connoisseur of antique dealers and coins, from whom the most exquisite pieces of the set come. Jewelry and dresses, of course, but also her wedding dress, the Limoges cutlery set used at the wedding, the suitcase set where she packed her belongings for the honeymoon spent in London. The delicious fabrics to which Woodward devoted much of his leisure time – and not only: it was not strange to see her sewing in the interviews he gave on television -: a fox that upholsters an armchair, a reminder of the date of the couple's marriage, English divans of the eighteenth century, private photographs, many shot by Joanne herself, who reveals herself as an excellent photographer and who insistently places her husband in front of the lens: with a family dog (6), with Sophia Loren in the filming of Lady L (1965) (115).

Paul Newman embraces Sebastien Bourdais after a motorsport championship in 2007. On his wrist he wears one of his two Rolex Daytona, now up for auction. Jonathan Ferrey (Getty Images)

Portrait of Paul Newman by his wife Joanne Woodward.Courtesy of Sotheby's

And books, many books: impossible not to stop at the first editions of Charles Dickens, Willa Carther or Scott Fitzgerald, before the copy of The Glass Zoo dedicated by its author, Tennessee Williams, even before the copy of Life signed by the protagonist of its cover, Mohammed Ali. Although it is more surprising (by revealing) the batch of erotic volumes that accompanied the couple in their first years of relationship. Because do not think that this delicacy amounts to pacatería: among the belongings put up for auction is the famous bronze bed that Woodward bought in an antique dealer in New Orleans (171) and placed in a room on whose walls he painted by hand the words fuck hut ("refuge to fuck").

But the jewel in the crown is made up of two Rolex Daytona watches owned by Paul Newman. In a recent auction, a third reached the astronomical figure of seventeen million dollars. These two are raising immense expectations among collectors, aware that their economic estimate will be added to the added value of the two small great stories that both contain. The actor had discovered an unexpected fondness for motorsport in 1968, during the filming of 500 Miles. Always hesitant about his worth as a performer, Newman felt when sitting behind the wheel of a race car that irrepressible obsession that someone finds when they unexpectedly stumble upon an activity for which they feel naturally gifted. The actor would soon make the leap to the professional circuit, with milestones as memorable as a second place in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The famous bronze bed Woodward bought at a New Orleans antique dealer.Courtesy of Sotheby's

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the dining room of their Paris apartment in 1960.Leo Fuchs (Getty Images)

On this parallel route nothing would have for Newman the importance of his triumph in one of the most prestigious automotive endurance awards on the planet, the 24 Hours of Daytona. And with the addition of doing so in 1995, which would allow him to hold a mark not yet surpassed: the oldest winner in the history of the championship. Rolex, sponsor of the event, would offer him as a prize a very rare copy of gold and lemon sphere that would have for him a much greater weight than any Oscar, Emmy or Golden Globe that he housed on his shelves. The attachment he felt for him shows the other, of white gold, which as in a mirror accompanies him in the auction. Woodward would give it to him ten years later, after carving the phrase "Drive slowly" on the back. As advice, it was not bad for someone who continued to enjoy the adrenaline of the speed past the eighties barrier. With him on his wrist Newman would win his last renowned race, at the Lime Rock Park circuit.

Allow us one last quib about the original Daytona to add a new facet to the portrait of the actor. The watch was already under public attention in 1999, when Newman decided to auction it through the Swiss house Antiquorum and donate the proceeds to Hole in the Wall Gang, an association for the care of terminally ill children. The Daytona seemed lost forever in the hands of some collector, but a few years later not a few specialists noticed that it was Newman himself who carried it during the celebration of a triumph of his team at the Hermanos Rodríguez racetrack in Mexico City. Newman did not give any explanation about it, but the reality did not take long to reveal: it had been he himself – or someone in his closest environment – who had paid those $ 39,000 for him. Give visibility to a humanitarian association, donate a high amount from the most absolute anonymity and recover an object that for him always had immense importance, or how to kill three birds with one stone with exquisite elegance. Although today Joanne, unfortunately, can not remember any of that.

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